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With today’s Fruit Grower Report, I’m Bob Larson. The winter weather we’ve seen for the past few weeks has been interesting to say the least. But, what about the weeks and months ahead?

Washington State Climatologist Nick Bond was calling for a mild El Nino weather pattern last fall and says that appears to still be the case …

BOND … “The Climate Prediction Center of NOAA has officially called it an El Nino now. It’s certainly going to be a weak one. It doesn’t look like it’s going to have the same sort of remote effects that most El Nino’s have. They usually cause kind of a pattern of highs and lows that kind of arching out of the tropical Pacific that we use to help make our seasonal weather forecasts and so forth. The pattern that has kind of developed this year is not like previous El Ninos.”

So that means a bit warmer and drier? Bond says that’s true …

BOND … “Yeah, that’s true. And, for what it’s worth, while the next few weeks look like they’re going to be on the cool side, not frigid necessarily, but cooler than normal for this time of year. That doesn’t really mean that the whole spring and summer isn’t necessarily going to be cool and there’s some indications, again the crystal ball kind of, definitely kind of fuzzy when you’re looking that far out, but around the, somewhere in the first week of March, or something like that, that we’ll return to a more normal kind of weather pattern.”

Listen tomorrow for more on our El Nino weather that’s expected to persist through the spring and summer.